Gender special issue
Digital News Report: Australia 2023
Women in News Special Report: Gender Gaps in News Consumption and Engagement
21 November 2023
Jee Young Lee, Kieran McGuinness, Sora Park, Caroline Fisher, Pinker Yao, Mona Chatskin & Kerry McCallum
Published by the News & Media Research Centre
Keywords:
Description:
This special issue of the Digital News Report: Australia 2023 focuses on gender differences in consumption, perceptions of and engagement with news as well as views on key news topics, such as climate change and reporting on gender issues. Data from nine previous issues of the Digital News Report: Australia 2015-2023 consistently show a gender gap in news consumption and attitudes towards news. In this special issue we conducted a comprehensive analysis of these gender differences in a global context.
The findings suggest that Australian women are less interested and engaged with news than men. The gap between men and women in interest is also the widest in the world, and this reflects stark differences in preferences and attitudes towards news. Women are much less interested in politics and are more likely to say they don’t know their political orientation. They are less trusting of mainstream news media and appear to be more likely to engage with social media as a source of information. It’s possible this reflects that women feel poorly represented by news, or that news does not provide them with topics that are relevant to them.
Publication Details
DOI: https://doi.org/10.26191/febf-hz61
ISBN: 978-1-74088-561-4
Copyright: News & Media Research Centre, University of Canberra 2023
License type: CC BY-NC-SA
Access rights type: Open